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In this conference paper, Peter König et al. discuss embodied cognition in the human brain from perspectives of spatial cognition, sensorimotor processing, face processing, and mobile EEG
recordings. The argument is based upon experimental evidence gathered from five separate studies.
Study 1) demonstrates that spatial orientation of houses is primarily learned in an action-oriented way.
In study 2) it is shown that cortical representations of facial viewpoints traverse a distinct sequence, expressing different encoding schemes at different latencies. Study 3) is a benchmark test of mobile EEG systems. Study 4) uses Independent Component Analysis of EEG data showing that in cognitive tasks some independent components systematically relate to sensory processing as well as to action execution. The ongoing Study 5) is a real-world application investigating face processing during natural visual exploration in a fully mobile setup.
The findings support the assumption that cognitive processes are rooted in the body's interactions with the world. Thus to understand cognitive processes it is needed to consider the (inter)actions in the natural environment.

When two or more individuals coordinate their actions to jointly control an object (e.g., carrying a table), they may reach a higher performance compared to performing the same task alone - a group

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benefit. The present review by Wahn et al. integrates findings from previous studies for two types of joint control - "distributed control" and "redundant control" - to determine common principles and explain differing results.

Interestingly, they found that when control is distributed, individuals tend to outperform dyads or attain similar performance levels. For redundant control, conversely, dyads have been shown to outperform individuals. The authors suggest that these differences might be explained by the possibility to freely distribute control in line with individual capabilities, enabling them to maximize the benefit of the available skills in the group.

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Welcome to the socSMCs project!

As robots become more omnipresent in our society, we are facing the challenge of making them more socially competent. However, in order to safely and meaningfully cooperate with humans, robots must be able to interact in ways that humans find intuitive and understandable. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel approach for understanding and modelling social behaviour and implementing social coupling in robots.

Our approach presents a radical departure from the classical view of social cognition as mind- reading, mentalising or maintaining internal representations of other agents. This project is based on the view that even complex modes of social interaction are grounded in basic sensorimotor interaction patterns. SensoriMotor Contingencies (SMCs) are known to be highly relevant in cognition. Our key hypothesis is that learning and mastery of action-effect contingencies are also critical to enable effective coupling of agents in social contexts. We use “socSMCs” as a shorthand for such socially relevant action-effect contingencies. We will investigate socSMCs in human-human and human-robot social interaction scenarios.

The main objectives of the project are to elaborate and investigate the concept of socSMCs in terms of information-theoretic and neurocomputational models, to deploy them in the control of humanoid robots for social entrainment with humans, to elucidate the mechanisms for sustaining and exercising socSMCs in the human brain, to study their breakdown in patients with autism spectrum disorders, and to benchmark the socSMCs approach in several demonstrator scenarios. Our long term vision is to realize a new socially competent robot technology grounded in novel insights into mechanisms of functional and dysfunctional social behavior, and to test novel aspects and strategies for human-robot interaction and cooperation that can be applied in a multitude of assistive roles relying on highly compact computational solutions

The project is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Andreas K. Engel at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. It runs from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641321.